Digital Vomit writes: With the upcoming reboot of the famous X-COM franchise of squad-based tactical games, it's troubling to see how the video game industry, as a whole, has declined and stagnated. Being well past the golden and silver ages, the modern gaming industry has devolved into a glut of clones of roughly two or three dominant genres. Much of the blame for this can be attributed to the attitude of game publishers, such as 2K Games' president, Christoph Hartmann, who said, of the X-COM franchise:

"The '90s generation of gamers all love Xcom and we own the IP, so we thought OK, what do we do with it? Every studio we had wanted to do it and each one had its own spin on it. But the problem was that turn-based strategy games were no longer the hottest thing on planet Earth. But this is not just a commercial thing — strategy games are just not contemporary."

Is there any way to save the gaming industry from itself, or is it doomed to stagnate under the control of narrow-sighted publishers?